Year in Preview

Some things to read in the months to come

I didn’t publish a damn thing outside this newsletter this year, but I did get a book deal, or half of one, in January, and that was a fantastic way to kick off 2024. I also bought a house and moved an hour outside of Chicago, saw my sweet little community sewing bee project lovingly mocked by Stephen Colbert, and managed to both stay cancer free and not break any more bones, both of which, given recent history, I consider a victory for the integrity of my physical person.

What I did do this year was work at my job and bring nine (ten?) fantastic projects over the line from concept to published book. Publishing is a long game, and acquisitions work generally happens out of the limelight, in the conversations editors have with writers over time, as book projects shape-shift from concept to proposal to manuscript. So I was inordinately pleased earlier this month when the Chicago Reader, the alt-weekly that pretty much taught me to be an editor, singled out two of the books I acquired for my 3 Fields Books imprint at the University of Illinois Press as “required reading” in an end-of-the-year roundup. A really nice, full-circle feeling there.

If you follow books and publishing, you know that it’s almost impossible for books to get any meaningful (unpaid) publicity these days. Legacy media has crumbled, newspapers have canned their books sections, print magazines have folded, online outlets are laying off critics by the scores, leading publishers to redirect their publicity budgets to courting influencers on BookTok. In my lane, nonfiction, the New York Times bestseller list is dominated by celebrities — right now Melania and Cher’s memoirs top the list, along with memoirs by Alex Van Halen, Ina Garten, and Lisa Marie Presley. But none of that even matters because people don’t trust the media anyway, or they’ve just stopped reading entirely,

So, rather than recap what I’ve read in the past year, or share resolutions I probably won’t keep, I thought I’d use this platform to drop a little holiday week preview of some upcoming books* I’m excited about. Some of them I edited, some of them I’ve read the ARCs, but all of them I, full disclosure, have some sort of relationship with one way or another. Take these recommendations in full knowledge of the bias with which I deliver them! Here they are, in order of pub date.

Eiren Caffall, All the Water in the World: A Novel (St. Martin’s, Jan. 7)

Utterly compromised right out of the gate with this one, as Eiren is one of my closest friends and over the past eleven years I’ve read multiple drafts of this thrilling climate-driven adventure, told through the eyes of an observant 13-year-old girl who can “feel water.” In the wake of a hypercane that floods a dystopic New York City, narrator Nonie must leave her home in an encampment on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History and embark on a perilous journey up the Hudson with her father, sister, and a family friend. It is, seriously, a page turner, but it’s also a meditation on the things we save in a crisis, and a love letter to scientists as the keepers of human knowlege.

Eiren is having a wild year: Her memoir, The Mourner’s Bestiary, was published in October to rapturous acclaim, stars all around, and most recently some lovely praise from BookTok’s best influencer, Nathan Shuherk aka Schizophrenic Reads (also now on Substack). To follow that up TWO MONTHS LATER with a debut novel is a doubleheader few previously unpublished authors get to attempt, but yet it is happening — and the stars are rolling in again. I am terribly proud of her; everyone should read both these books.

Neko Case, The Harder I Fight, the More I Love You: A Memoir (Grand Central, Jan. 28)

Neko wrote the wonderful foreword to the Sinéad O’Connor book (see below) and has been a true-blue supporter of this newsletter from its early days. We crossed paths often when she lived in Chicago in the 2000s, and we share some common formative years in the Pacific Northwest of the 1970s and 80s, some of which she has been writing about of late in her own newsletter, Entering the Lung — which is a wryly funny, sweet, and at times furious chronicle of her love for the natural world and, also, of the joy of making music with your friends.

But I did not know much of Neko’s own story until now. The Harder I Fight … is a coming of age story, not so much a music memoir per se. No sordid backstage tales or studio geekery here! It is a story of childhood trauma and breathtaking neglect, but also of misadventure and serendipity and of finding joy and community in relationship with friends, with animals, with other musicians, and with the occasional random adult. She also drops a lot of knowledge about the DNA of creativity that I found honestly inspiring. It reminded me how close we all are to artistry, if we could just stop telling our inner voice to shut up and be normal. Neko is SUCH a gifted writer; her exuberant, frank use of language just carries you along for the ride; I think I read the whole thing in like five hours.

Larry Bennett, Reclaiming Modernity: Essays on a Paradoxical Nostalgia (University of Illinois Press, Feb. 25)

This is a book I acquired that’s more academic than some of the others on my list, but I’m very fond of it, in all its pointyheaded glory. It’s short — three anchor essays wrapped in an introduction and conclusion. The essays explore three nodes of “nostalgia for modernity”: the fight to save brutalist architecture, as told through the story of Bertrand Goldberg’s doomed Prentice Women’s Hospital, where several of my friends gave birth to their babies; the nostalgia for the so-called glory days of midcentury Brooklyn and Detroit, as evidenced through the memoirs of those who lived them; and the contemporary resurgence of interest in turntables and vinyl records. Like I said, pointy. And all over the subject-matter map in a way that probably frustrates the sales reps. (Does it get shelved in “architecture” or “music”? Can’t we get rid of the scary word “modernity” in the title?) But for readers who enjoy watching a skilled author flex in service of answering their own idiosyncratic intellectual questions, I highly recommend.

Ariel Gore, Rehearsals for Dying: Digressions on Love and Cancer (Feminist Press, March 11)

Ariel Gore’s wife Deena Chafetz was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer in 2021; she died in 2023. At some point in 2022, Gore posted a note on Facebook, asking if anyone with lived experience of breast cancer treatment, or the caretaking of someone going through treatment, would be interested in answering some questions for a book she was working on, and I and many others raised our hands. Our collective experiences appear as a Greek chorus informing this utterly necessary book, which tells Deena’s story, but also Ariel’s story, as they ride an excruciating roller coaster of hope and disappointment, complete with dismissive doctors, unhelpful insurance carriers, friends urging “positivity,” and a whole gamut of treatments of diminishing returns.

I wept through parts, but it is not a grim book, because Gore is not a grim person, or writer. It is darkly funny and loudly queer, written with a skeptic’s eye toward not just the medical industrial complex but mainstream understandings of illness as providing a pat narrative arc. And it’s a powerful testament to Deena, whose fortitude, bawdy realism, and tenderness are rendered with gallons of love on the page by her widow.

Don Zminda, Justice Batted Last: Ernie Banks , Minnie Miñoso, and the Unheralded Players Who Integrated Chicago’s Major League Teams (3 Fields Books, March 11)

This is another book I acquired, and a good example of how acquistions editors often work outside their comfort zone. I’m not a baseball person! And this book is very much about baseball, written by an author well-known to folks interested in baseball stats and statistics but until his proposal landed in my in-box a stranger to me. But it’s also a book about Chicago, and about — as the title notes — justice, both topics well in my wheelhouse. It’s a narrative history of the how Banks and Miñoso became the first players of color to integrate the Chicago Cubs and White Sox (respectively), set against the backdrop of ongoing racial violence in midcentury Chicago, specificially a 1951 riot in suburban Cicero of racist white neighbors against a Black family of newcomers. It’s also about the many minor league players of color who never got a shot at the majors, but who slowly paved the way for the full integration of Major League Baseball. I’m really happy to be publishing this. I may have been unfamiliar with the subject matter, but I learned a lot — and isn’t that the point?

Nora Wendl, Almost Nothing: Recovering Edith Farnsworth (3 Fields Books, May 20)

Meanwhile, I’m SO excited about this one, which I can say with confidence is one of the most brilliant books you may read all year. I first met Nora years ago, when she was in the middle of researching this book, and we reconnected in 2022, after her manuscript was shortlisted for, but did not win the Graywolf Prize. Almost Nothing is an audacious hybrid of biography and memoir, a radical reimagining of the story of Edith Farnsworth, the Chicago nephrologist who commissioned Mies van der Rohe to build her a glass house on the banks of the Fox River, and whose story has for decades been sidelined to that of the ‘great man.’ It’s also a meditation on misogyny, architecture, love, professional ambition, and a pissed off interrogation of just who gets to write history. Early reviews of this book (“astonishing"; “flawless”) are giving me so much joy, and I can’t wait to see it launch into the world. Deeply researched creative nonfiction that engages with Illinois history is the elusive sweet spot at the center of the 3 Fields list and I’d love to see more proposals for work in this vein.

Sonya Huber and Martha Bayne, eds., Nothing Compares to You: What Sinéad O’Connor Means to Us (One Signal, July 22)

Last but not least! This is the book Sonya Huber and I have been working on all year. It comes out in July, and I believe ARCs will be available quite soon. I’m excited and nervous — the work in here is vulnerable and real. I want it to be embraced by the world. You can read more about the developmental process in Sonya’s newsletter, here, but I’ll just tease out this one paragraph, because it’s pretty perfect:

And then Martha and I worked our butts off with a solid 6 months of editing, soliciting more writers with Mariah’s help, and the help of other contributors, using a series of Dropbox folders to move essays through our production process, tracking everything on a spreadsheet, doing zoom calls, and navigating our lives and curveballs of life in the process. And also: because of where many of these authors are in their lives, many of them Gen X, they had such life challenges with illness, caretaking, death of parents and other significant people, and other calamities, and yet they wrote through it, doing the thing, responding to emails in grief, practicing their craft in the face of sadness and challenges and change. The most common email Martha and I exchanged during the editing process, as the essays came in one by one, was “OMG go to the folder, this essay is freaking amazing!!”

Look for it this summer — and if you’d like an ARC or have a relationship to a bookstore or other venue in your community that might want to host us for an event, please do reach out.

Thank you!

*There are some more cool projects coming in the latter part of the year but they’re not ready for public consumption.